Open Ag Data Alliance offers farmer privacy, data control

Source: Open Ag Data Alliance | Mar 12, 2014

On Tuesday, the Open Ag Data Alliance (OADA) launched its organization to develop protocols and create security and privacy working groups that collaborate with other stakeholders to ensure farmer peace of mind regarding the protection and use of their data across a broad range of business policies and practices.

“OADA will work to ensure farmers can move their data seamlessly and securely between their equipment, software and services by speeding the development of technical standards for data formatting and interoperability that will be openly developed, and shared,” said David Friedberg, The Climate Corporation’s CEO, who announced the company’s intent to support the formation of the OADA in an announcement earlier this year. “In addition, OADA will work to provide the technology capabilities necessary to support security and privacy rules that farmers and community groups need in order to ensure that farmer data is wholly respected and protected by all software and organizations the farmer selects. Central to the alliance’s work is the guiding principle that each farmer owns data generated or entered by the farmer, their employees or by machines performing activities on their farm.”

The project lead is Aaron Ault, senior research engineer for the Open Ag Software Technology Group at Purdue, and also a farmer.

“I’m very pleased to be facilitating the open standards software development in OADA, which I view as a natural extension of the work we have done in Purdue’s Open Ag Technology Group,” Ault said. “As a farmer, I need the freedom to select the right hardware, software and services for my operation. The open standards of OADA will give farmers the flexibility and control they need to choose data science products and services that will work on their farms to help manage their data and make more data-driven decisions, enabling the next wave of agricultural production.”

The OADA is open to anyone interested in building open standards data transfer tools in agriculture, including: existing agriculture organizations, farmers, software engineers, academics, and private companies. There is no cost to participate. More information can be found at: http://openag.io/.